FEAR
AND TREMBLING IN THE IMPERIAL CAMP?

I
don't want to read too much into it, but I think it is just possible
that some of the guardians of the Warfare State at the neo-conservative
Weekly Standard
(but the two articles I'm discussing are not available online; there
is, however, a rather good David Gelernter piece on Rembrandt) are
a bit worried about whether their worldview can or will prevail
in upcoming American political battles.

The first piece is by John R. Bolton, now with the American Enterprise
Institute and an assistant secretary of state during the Bush administration.
He bemoans what he calls "how completely American policy toward
Saddam Hussein has collapsed,'' with Exhibit A being the fact that
the U.N. Security Council keeps dithering over whether to create
a new version of the old UNSCOM Iraqi weapons inspection program.
Bolton acknowledges that "the proposal's practical effectiveness
is dubious at best,'' but still cries in his beer that it has been
held up "for eight long months, by explicit Russian (and tacit
Chinese and French) veto threats.''

SADDAM BREAKS FREE?

Bolton claims that after the Gulf War
Saddam had two principal goals: breaking free of he international
weapons inspection program and escaping international sanctions.
"Before Saddam could achieve either of these objectives, of
course, the U.S.-led Persian Gulf coalition would have to fragment
politically. Which, unfortunately, is exactly what's happened.''

Bolton places the bulk of the blame for this fragmentation on the
Clinton administration, which he thinks has "been inattentive
to, and feckless about, foreign policy in general.'' If Madeleine
Albright had only used her vast influence on Kofi Annan, maybe things
would not be in such woeful shape.

Bolton doesn't give any consideration to the possibility that, eight
years after the Famous Victory, other countries are ready to move
beyond a condition of permanent war with Saddam. Nor does he give
more than a nod to the idea that, if the Bushies really wanted to
remove Saddam from power  which he thinks should be the explicit
cornerstone of current policy  they should have done so when
they had overwhelming force, backed by a powerful international
coalition, during an actual war (even if it was, like most modern
American wars, an undeclared and probably unconstitutional one).

PERMANENT
WAR FOR PERMANENT PEACE

It was George Orwell, in his book 1984
who coined the term "permanent war for permanent peace.'' The
book makes it clear that this was a cynical slogan employed by a
brutal totalitarian regime in part to keep the huddled masses living
in fear so they would be easier to control.

At the end of the millennium, however, in the country that proudly
proclaimed itself the center of the Free World during the Cold War,
the idea that the nation should be engaged in a condition of permanent
war falls easily from the keyboards of those who represent the party
that used to claim it was for limited government. Bolton notes that
"Iraq is still subject to a desultory American air campaign
(we now drop bombs filled with cement in order to minimize Iraqi
casualties)'' but this is hardly enough to suit his lust for all-out
aggression against the Evil Saddam.

He also shows no concern at all for the Iraqi people, the purported
victims of the evil Saddam about whom numerous American leaders
have occasionally shed crocodile tears. Not only does he not consider
the possibility that the concrete bombs are being used because the
U.S. has run out of legitimate military targets and is raining tons
on civilian targets just to keep in practice. He doesn't begin to
acknowledge the fact that it is the Iraqi people, not Saddam Hussein,
who have suffered from the economic embargo he wants to see strengthened
and intensified.

UNCERTAINTY
AND EVEN FEAR?

Here's where it gets interesting, however,
suggesting the quite real possibility that Saddam hawks like John
Bolton, in their heart of hearts, suspect that not only do very
few foreign countries have any enthusiasm for keeping a permanent
war on Saddam going, but hardly any of the American people want
to keep it going either.

He first notes that the overarching goal of getting rid of Saddam
"is not a question the Clinton administration can be depended
on to address by itself; seven years of incompetence have left the
White House and State Department with precious few options to reverse
the downward drift of our Iraq policy'' So he hopes (and he probably
knows it's hoping against hope) that "the current crop of candidates
has a major opportunity to reinvigorate the US response to Saddam
Hussein.''

How? He thinks they should make it explicit that if elected they
would make removal of Saddam an explicit and paramount goal of American
foreign policy, and even that "Saddam's fate should be the
catalyst for a larger debate ... Should force be employed not only
to solve an immediate strategic problem, but also to eliminate the
regime which has precipitated it?''

A
FORMULA FOR POLITICAL OBLIVION

Wouldn't it be interesting if a candidate
put it in such explicit terms? How do you suppose that would go
over? I can almost imagine John McCain saying it, but I find it
difficult to imagine that it would gain him much electoral support.

The American people were willing to be stirred up about Saddam Hussein
in 1990-91 and probably would have supported an assault on Baghdad
back then to take him out, even if they knew that the rhetoric about
the worst threat since Hitler was a bit overblown. After all, Saddam
really is a tyrant who has ambitions to unsettle his neighbors.
But they have processed the conduct of that war and the aftermath.
They know now that Saddam is far from an overarching strategic threat
but a local if troublesome pipsqueak.

WHO
WANTS TO MAKE THIS FIGHT?

Americans don't seem to be too exercised
about continuing feckless (although destructive to many people in
Iraq besides Saddam and his allies) bombing of Iraq. But are they
ready to gear up for another war in the Persian Gulf?

I don't think so. And I don't think anybody who seriously wants
to be elected president thinks so either. In fact, I don't think
John Bolton thinks so. He hopes one of the presidential contenders
musters the courage and leadership to make Iraq a major campaign
issue, and soon. If one doesn't, "if we miss the opportunity,
there is little hope that we will ever get another.''

That strikes me as remarkably good news. The keepers of the Warfare
State or at least some of them) are worried that the political process
won't give them the chance to take out one of their enemies.

BASHING
CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS

Another article in the same issue of
the Standard, by Lawrence Kaplan of The National Interest
concentrates on bashing Congressional Republicans who are so impudent
as to question perpetual military and diplomatic engagement and
aggression in the rest of the world and insist on "grappling
over questions presumed to have been settled half a century ago.''

Oh, those upstarts who don't know that once the elites have settled
a matter and influenced the writing of the history textbooks, the
matter should be forever closed to discussion! How can they have
the nerve to intrude on the counsels of the anointed with their
picky questions and doubts?

LIKING
IKE, BUT NOT THAT MUCH

Kaplan notes that "this is hardly
the first time Republicans have been split down the middle with
respect to the aims of American foreign policy.'' In 1952, when
Eisenhower won the nomination and the election, he was peppered
from behind by pesky quasi-isolationists from the Taft wing, who
had the insufferable nerve to question the Marshall Plan and NATO.
But Ike won the election.

Unfortunately, in Kaplan's view, he made too many bows to party
unity after he was elected, which meant he was unable to carry out
a foreign policy aggressive enough to suit Kaplan. And then "the
gap between the Eisenhower administration's aggressive hyperbole
and the reality of its tentative foreign policy led to the justifiable
impression of American hypocrisy  most notably, in the case
of the Hungarian uprising.''

INVOKING
THE FIRST ROOSEVELT

Mr. Kaplan urges the next Republican
president to hark back to the example of Theodore Roosevelt, who
also "found his vision of America's global role hamstrung by
Republican isolationists. And so he wielded executive power to send
the US fleet around the world, dispatch forces to South America,
engineer our acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone, and win a Nobel
Prize for brokering peace between Japan and Russia.''

Fascinating. Leave aside for the moment that the United States is
already far more intimately involved, with heavy, expensive commitments,
in more places around the world than Teddy-Boy could have imagined.
And leave aside the assumption that it should be virtually instinctive
for a Republican to be eager to expand and use executive power unilaterally
in the face of significant congressional opposition.

Would a Republican President elected in 2000  let's stick with
the conventional wisdom and say George Bush or maybe John McCain  really want to spend a good deal of his political capital being
"in-your-face'' to his own party for the sake of global adventurism?
Maybe, if there's a near-universally-perceived crisis of some sort.
But for a continuation of the Clinton fiasco in Kosovo or an uprising
in Indonesia or Pakistan? If enough congressional Republicans are
firm and vocal on the matter  and it's likely at least some would
be  a president would probably think twice about making some pipsqueak
imperialist mission a make-or-break issue.

IMPERIAL
UNCERTAINTY?

And I think the keepers of the Imperial
Flame at the Weekly Standard have the same impression, except that
what I would call hopes they would call fears. The enthusiasts for
American global hegemony seem to have this uneasy feeling that maybe,
just maybe, their enthusiasms are not widely shared. That's why
they run articles urging presidents and presidential candidates
to be more aggressive in putting down the pretensions of the "neo-isolationists''

Again, I don't want to make too much of this. But I think this just
might be a sign of imperial weakness and therefore good news.

Please
Support Antiwar.com

A
contribution of $20 or more gets you a copy of Justin Raimondo's
Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against US Intervention in
the Balkans, a 60-page booklet packed with the kind of intellectual
ammunition you need to fight the lies being put out by this administration
and its allies in Congress. Send contributions to